ABSTRACT
In the first essay of the present collection I have tried to show how much may be learned by a right use of Plato’s Phaedo about the vie intime of Socrates and his connection with the Pythagorean societies in which “philosophy” was pursued as a way of redemption from the “body of death” into everlasting life. By the tragedy of the Phaedo I now wish to set the splendid comic burlesque of the Clouds, and to show how very exactly the one confirms the other, and how ridiculously Aristophanes has misconceived his function if the currently accepted view of Socrates as primarily a commonplace moralist of the market-place is veritable history. For if the Clouds is really a genuine caricature, by the hand of a master in the art, of the hero of the Phaedo, we ought to be able to trace in it, with due allowance for the distortion which it is the business of the caricaturist to effect, the very lineaments which we see glorified by the approach of martyrdom in the Phaedo. If we can do so, all serious doubt as to the historical character of Plato’s account of his master’s pursuits and mental history should be dispelled, and for this reason the play of Aristophanes, if it can be trusted at all, is one of the most precious of all documents for the study of the development of Greek philosophical thought. This is a fact which has already been recognised by some writers on Socraticism, notably in Italy, 1 but is not, so far as I know, adequately appreciated among ourselves. We are still too much in the habit of taking it for granted that the “Socrates” of 130Aristophanes is not so much a caricature, and a life-like caricature, of a notable personality as a fancy-picture in which all the ludicrous or objectionable features of the “new learning” have been combined, with an entire disregard for historical fact. The play, we are commonly told, is a general attack on the “sophists,” and by “sophists” the exponents of this view mean, not what the word really signified in the Attic of Aristophanes’ time, pretenders to specialist knowledge of any and every kind, but what it has been made to mean for us, more especially by the influence of Grote, the travelling professors of the arts of persuasive speech. Its protagonist is no real individual man, but a sort of composite photograph in which the features of all the leading peripatetic professors are ingeniously blended. Even Dr. Verrall, who has shown so brilliantly how much may be learned from the Frogs about the historical personality and habits of Euripides, has thought it necessary to dismiss the “Socrates” of the Clouds as no true caricature with the remark (as we shall see, a mistaken one,) that in all probability Socrates was not well enough known in 423, when the play was produced, for wanton disregard of verisimilitude in the comic picture to be detected or resented by the mass of Athenian playgoers. 1 If this were true, the work would, of course, lose all its value for the student of Plato and of philosophy. I propose, however, to show in detail that it is not true, and that the Clouds, when carefully read, so exactly confirms the statements of the Phaedo as to the entourage of Socrates and his early associations with the science of the previous generation, as to leave little doubt that the Platonic representation is curiously exact even down to matters of detail. To be more precise, I undertake to give reasons for holding that the play is not directed at all against the “sophists” in the sense in which that word is commonly understood in English, but against a specific group of persons who combined scientific research with ἄσκησις, the quest of salvation from the body, that is, against the 131very circle whose portraits have been drawn from the point of view of a sympathizer in the Phaedo. I think, moreover, that I can make it clear that the brunt of the attack is specifically directed against the conception of “dialectic” as the universal science, and the dialectician as the true statesman which we have come to connect more particularly with the Platonic Republic.
